


Ursa Major

by simplyprologue



Series: Careful the Tale You Tell (Children Will Listen) [18]
Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Charlotte-fic, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Kid Fic, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-03
Updated: 2015-09-11
Packaged: 2018-04-18 19:19:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4717493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mac isn’t sure if she can pinpoint exactly where worry bubbles over into incandescent rage — possibly around the time Charlotte gets the words <i>won’t stop touching me</i> out of her mouth the second time, maybe sooner — but she controls it, if only for her daughter’s sake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. love is a word so small

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** This was supposed to be a lot funnier than it turned out to be, I think. And a lot shorter, but I'm used to that. Warnings for harm coming to a child (from another child) and discussions of misogyny, general sexist bullshit. It's sort of based off of an incident from my childhood, something that happened not to me but to a friend. The title of the chapters are taken from "Now Three" by Vienna Teng. The title is a reference to the constellation Ursa Major (aka the Great She-Bear, aka the Big Dipper), which isn't complete without Ursa Minor. It's also just an obvious reference to the whole "Momma Bear" thing. Will and Rebecca are both tagged in this fic, but don't make appearances until Part II. 
> 
> Also my apologies because I owe people literally like five hundred comments. I will get on those (finally! finally!) in the morning. 
> 
> Part II is mostly written. It should be posted in a few days, barring some great catastrophe.

If the phone call from Columbia Grammar's head secretary was about Josie, she’d certainly be disappointed, but not totally shocked. Teddy, even, she thinks she could make the mental stretch from theory to reality if she heard it was to defend someone else or he was dragged in along with a friend or two. But Charlotte? Not her sweet Charlotte, her kind little girl. And also her headstrong little girl, of course, and as a general rule willful and opinionated — but ultimately gentle and sweet and embodying of all of Will’s better angels, without any of his lesser demons.

(She doesn’t want to be _that_ mother, the _my child would never_ mother who insists past the point of confronting the truth in front of her face, but Charlotte would _never._ Not without very good reason.) 

_Ms. McHale, your daughter Charlotte has punched another student. We need you to come pick her up as soon as possible and to meet with the administrative disciplinary board._

Across from her in the town car, Leona seems completely nonplussed by the situation. “There is not a shot in hell that little twerp didn’t deserve getting his nose broken.”

Her fingers tap restlessly in her lap. There really is no _good_ variation on this particular theme — _your daughter Charlotte has punched another student_ — as it either ends with some snot-nosed brat laying his hands on Charlotte first or Charlotte gleefully dabbling in assault and battery, something which she and Will were rather certain she had left behind once she’d learned that Teddy was around to stay and that biting her baby brother was only going to earn her a place on the naughty step. Either Charlotte is guilty, or someone hurt her daughter.

Maybe she and Will should have thought harder about letting her skip the third grade. Now she’s with kids she doesn’t know at all.

_Tap. Tap. Tap._

Licking her lips, she glances at Leona and shrugs. “I know she probably just—”

“Damn right you know. Mother’s intuition. Charlotte has a good head on her shoulders, she wouldn’t just haul off and hit someone who didn’t have it coming,” Leona asserts, typing out something on her Blackberry, and then looks up. With a near pensive look on her face, she places a fingertip against her temple. “Good head. And knuckles made of fucking brass.”

Mac cringes. “What if they expel her?”

It’s late October. They could find her another school. And she knows suspension is more likely than expulsion, especially since Charlotte has the McAvoy name behind her, but _still._

“They won’t.”

Leona seems awfully sure. Squinting, Mac finds herself wondering about Reese’s disciplinary record at Columbia Grammar during the glory days of _his_ youth.

She swallows hard. “But what if they—”

“They won’t.”

Leona dismisses the idea with a lazy wave of her hand, the same as she did back at the restaurant they were lunching in when her cell phone rang. It does nothing for Mac’s heart, pounding against her breastbone. Her hand twitches towards her own cell phone — she should call Will. But he’s in DC for a week, covering the countdown to the midterm elections with the rest of her primetime on-air talent. So really with all she knows currently, all that calling her husband will amount to is giving him some sort of apoplexy.

The car slows to a stop outside the school’s West 94th entrance. Mac says nothing when Leona steps out behind her — she half expected it, albeit she feels a slight apprehension of walking into the headmaster’s office with an eighty year old woman wearing an ermine-trimmed coat and four inch stilettos.

Her heart pounds the entire way as they’re lead up to the Headmaster’s office, her palms slickening with sweat. Biting her lip, she adjusts her purse over her shoulder, loosens her grip of her scarf around her neck.

_As long as they’re alright._

It’s always been the first thing, since Will threw himself headlong into being the molecular opposite of his own father. _I don’t care what you’ve done, so long as you’re alright. We can fix the rest._

When the secretary opens the door to the dim, wood-paneled office, she gasps. “Charlotte—”

Sitting in one of the stiff-backed wooden chairs lined to her right side against the far wall sits her oldest child, arms folded and legs crossed at the ankle, shoulders furled in. On her face sits an expression that Mac knows is a potent cross between anger and fear, her eyes brimmed with tears. Charlotte lifts her head, revealing swollen eyes and a split lip crusted over with blood that has also dribbled unconscionably down her chin and onto the collar of her white blouse.

Then she notices the other people in the room — the boy that Charlotte unquestionably hit, his parents, the Headmaster, and the Dean of Discipline.

“She’s been refusing to talk.” Headmaster Aldrich stands, buttoning his jacket. With a nod, he offers her one of the chairs in front of his desk. “Well, she said she wouldn’t tell us what happened until you got here, Mrs. McAvoy—”

MacKenzie elects to ignore his rather precise offer of a chair, instead sitting next to her daughter. Frowning, she lifts Charlotte’s chin to inspect her face.

“She’s Ms. McHale,” she hears Leona grouse. “And you already know who I am, Leroy.”

“Mrs. Lansing. I didn’t know you and Ms. McHale were acquainted.” Aldrich sounds vaguely off put; out of the corner of her eye, Mac sees Leona take the seat that she was offered. She has a slight suspicion that were this not a school, Leona would be busy procuring a cocktail from somewhere to better intimidate Aldrich and the boy’s parents with — Leona Lansing, she has learned, is never so scary as when she is well on her way to being drunk.  

“Young Charlotte is my granddaughter,” she says, and then holds out her arm. “Come here, sweet pea. A lady doesn’t let the blood dry on their clothes; it’s such a bother to get out once it’s set in.”

Charlotte looks up at Mac, tacitly asking permission. With a sigh, Mac helps her up out of the chair and watches her legs carry her unsteadily towards Leona, her patent leather Mary Janes scuffing against the rug. Brushing out invisible wrinkles from her skirt, Mac stands again. She takes an edifying breath, and then holds her hands out to the boy’s mother and father, trying to not stare at the mess Charlotte has made of their son’s face.

“Hello. MacKenzie McHale,” she says, pasting a lackluster excuse for a smile on her face.

A slim host of pleasantries is exchanged — they are in fact the boy’s mother and stepfather, Karen and Ramsey Haig, and the boy’s name is Aiden Jaycox and Ramsey is a partner at Gage Whitney and Karen is in interior design and from her corner, Leona huffs out that Mac is the President of ACN and if they don’t know who her husband is they should try turning on a television or looking at the side of one of those eyesore things the plebeians call the MTA grey line busses.

Blushing slightly, the Dean of Discipline offers his hand last, and introduces himself as a Mr. Grey Peterson.

Aldrich stares Charlotte down. “Now would you like to tell us what happened?”

Tugging at the end of her ponytail, Charlotte turns on one of her soft-soled heels to look at Mac. “Daddy said to never talk without a lawyer.”

Ramsey huffs out an indignant sort of laugh, scrubbing a hand over his face.

“Well,” Mac tries to say very gently, despite the worry boiling in her stomach. She knows a broken nose when she sees one — and Aiden Jaycox most definitely has a broken nose and _she_ would very much like to hear that Charlotte had a good reason to give him one. “You can talk now. Why did you hit Aiden?”

Squirming, Charlotte looks down at her shoes.

“Honey? Tell the truth.”

“He wouldn’t stop touching me,” she blurts out, tugging hard at her ponytail, still looking at the straps of her shoes. Mac’s gaze follows hers down, her eyes catching on her lopsided knee socks where the elastic on one has evidently broken. “He — Aiden won’t stop touching me. He pulls my hair and my clothes and touches me where you said people shouldn’t and I told Ms. Fairfax and she told him to stop but he keeps _doing it._ And I told him to leave me alone but he unbuttoned my skirt and took my shoe off when I was doing monkey bars and then grabbed my sock and today when the aide was walking us back from art he _tripped me_ and I fell and he pulled my bow out of my hair and I tried to grab it back and he untucked my blouse from my skirt and the buttons opened and _everyone saw_ and he reached again and _laughed_ so I hit him. _I’m sorry Mommy—”_

Mac isn’t sure if she can pinpoint exactly where worry bubbles over into incandescent rage — possibly around the time Charlotte gets the words _won’t stop touching me_ out of her mouth the second time, maybe sooner — but she controls it, if only for her daughter’s sake.

Headmaster Aldrich and Dean Peterson at least have the decency to _appear_ scandalized.

The Jaycox-Haigs, on the other hand… Mac can understand any parent's urge to lash out now.

“Oh, Charlie,” she murmurs.

With a pout that distinctly resembles Will’s, she stamps her foot. “But I’m _not_ sorry, I would hit him again!”

“I would hope so,” Leona mutters, petting Charlotte’s hair.

Behind his desk, Aldrich shifts uncomfortably on his feet. Smoothing a cold mask over his face, he looks at Aiden, and then Ramsey. “While I will not condone Aiden’s actions, physical violence is not allowed under any circumstances. The student code of conduct strictly states that she must be, at the least, suspended. Especially since it appears she will not apologize.”

Mac finds herself on her feet. “Excuse me?”

“She could have gone to her teacher,” the Dean adds in. “She could have shouted for help, she could have done a dozen other things before resorting to violence.”

“And what could her teacher do for her?” Mac snaps, feeling her hands twitch at her side for a very different reason than in the town car. “Charlotte was never separated from this boy. He wasn't removed from her presence after she made the problem known. And speaking of physical violence, what in God’s name do you consider a boy trying to pull the clothes off a girl then? Because no way is that _harmless teasing_. I think most people would agree that if my daughter was _eighteen_ and not eight, we’d be calling it sexual assault.”

To her left, Karen Haig pales dramatically.

Dean Peterson looks as if he’s quaking in his pleated chinos. With a deliberate slowness, he leans off the Headmaster’s bookshelves. “Mr. Jaycox, does Miss McAvoy’s account of what happened resemble the truth?”

“I was just kidding,” he mutters. Aiden, his dark hair flopping into his face, tries to shrink down in his chair between his mother and stepfather. “I didn’t _hurt_ her.”

It takes quite a bit of Mac’s self-control to not scoff at the petulant nine year old. Didn’t hurt her. Of course not. That’s why Charlotte’s lip isn’t bleeding and why Charlotte isn’t almost crying and why Charlotte doesn’t look like she wants to disappear into the floor.

Karen Haig puts her hand atop Aiden’s head, shoving him further down. “He just has a crush on her, I’m sure, he’ll grow out of—”

Mac _does_ scoff then.

“I want him transferred to another class. Charlotte will not be getting suspended today,” she says rather briskly, cutting Mrs. Haig off without so much as dignifying the bullshit streaming out from her mouth with a look in her direction. “I will take her home but because she’s been through too much today to go back to class. She will not be returning to school until my husband and I can sit down with you and Ms. Fairfax.” She allows herself to glance down at the uncomfortable blonde woman sitting not five feet from her. “And my advice to you, Mrs. Haig, is to teach your son that when a woman says stop, she means right now. I have a son too. He’s quite aware of personal boundaries.”

Then she looks back to Aldrich and Peterson.

“Am I understood?”

Leona, having procured a handkerchief and only God knows what from her purse, pauses from scrubbing the dabs of blood out from Charlotte’s shirt. “She better be.”

“And where _is_ Ms. Fairfax?” Mac asks. “Why isn’t she sitting in on this meeting?”

Ramsey Haig makes a small noise of protest, quieting when Mac glares at him.

“She has a class to teach, Ms. McHale. Dean Peterson and I are able to handle this ourselves,” Aldrich explains, grabbing the back of his chair. Mac doesn’t know if he was waiting for her to take a seat for herself or what, but with a weary glance towards her he eases himself back down into his desk chair. “I’m not sure of the logistics of moving a student to another class this late in the quarter—”

“Then I will figure out the logistics of moving my three children to another school,” she shoots back, her brain formulating the reply and spitting it out of her mouth with a rapidity she’s spent the past nine years honing first in sparring matches with Lucas Pruitt, and then in AWM in board meetings. “One that values personal safety.”

Truly, she hopes her voice is as saturated with anger just as much as she can see it coloring everything in her vision right now.

“And I will figure out the logistics of moving my donation to a different cause, Leroy,” Leona drolly adds in. “There’s probably some school for the children of starving artists’ out there that can use the Lansing trust to keep paint in the supply closet.”

Leona must finish with her cleaning then, because she pats Charlotte on the back and sends her back over to her side of the room. Head low, Charlotte slinks past MacKenzie to resume place in the chair at the side of the room. Continuing to stare down the Headmaster, Mac reaches for Charlotte and pulls her into her embrace.

Making a small noise of relief, Charlotte turns to hide her face in Mac’s waist.

“You promised my husband and I when we met about letting Charlotte skip a grade — you promised us personally that she wouldn’t face any social repercussions about moving ahead,” Mac continues, her tone a level calm that she doesn’t feel. Her hands travel up and down her daughter’s head and shoulders and back, fingers catching in her loosened ponytail. “You said it would be good for her. Look at her, she’s almost half a foot shorter than that boy.”

“We can talk about placing her in a third grade class—”

“No.” She could laugh, but instead pinches the bridge of her nose. “My daughter is brilliant. I’m sure we can come up with a way to make her shine in the fourth grade. Like moving Aiden here to another class, so we can prove to Charlotte that this school doesn’t want her to feel uncomfortable in her learning environment.”

Ramsey Haig looks like he’s about to start furnishing the room with an explosion, but she wouldn’t have made it so long in Charlie Skinner’s office had that sort of thing ever bothered her. _Go ahead and yell,_ she thinks. _Give me more of a reason to kick your ass._

Aldrich steeples his fingers together, looking down at his desk blotter for a long moment. “We will… have to discuss this further, Ms. McHale. When your husband is back from DC.”

“Yes, we will.” Nodding curtly, she looks purposefully at the boy now cowering in his seat. “Will Aiden be facing disciplinary action?”

Charlotte’s arms hug tightly around her waist.

“I say you just have Will slap him with a lawsuit,” Leona says, her careless wave making yet another appearance. “I’ll call in Becca to help him remember how tort works.”

“That really won’t be necessary,” Dean Peterson says uneasily, quietly gesturing the Headmaster to stand again. “Ms. McHale, Mrs. Lansing, if you could step out I think I’d prefer to speak to the Haigs privately about the correct course forward for Aiden.”

Mac nods again, and gives the Haigs a disdainful smile before returning her gaze to the two men running the show. For a moment, she considers removing Josie and Teddy for the rest of the day as well.

But Charlotte’s breath is hot and uneven through the silk of her blouse, her fingers clenching into her back, and she decides against it. The nanny can pick them up after school and bring them to her office, as scheduled.

“To whom do I speak about Charlotte leaving for the rest of the day?” she asks, leveling Aldrich with a cool look.

“I’ll handle it personally. And if you have any other concerns—”

“Was she seen by the nurse? Her lip was bleeding when I arrived.”

Tenderly, she pulls her daughter’s face away from her middle and frames her cheeks with her hands, examining her again with the discerning scrutiny of a mother’s eye.

Peterson looks an approximate amount of contrite. “I do not… believe so, ma’am.”

“Right.” Were this another life — perhaps if she was back in Baghdad, or Peshawar, and fifteen years younger — she would raise her voice and get in his face. Regardless, the temptation to loosen her claws it great, but she dampens the urge. Somehow, she manages to contort her face into a resentful grimace of a grin. “That’s all.”

Mindful of the fact that Will isn’t here to clean up any bungled attempt at a parting blow, MacKenzie gathers up Charlotte’s jacket and backpack, and sweeps out of the Headmaster’s office.

Fingers laced tightly together, mother and daughter descent the stairs at the same tempo. Unwilling to remain in the school for any longer than necessary, Mac makes quick work of getting Charlotte into her cold weather things.

Faintly, from where she's standing at the bottom of the landing, she hears Leona speak.

“You’re lucky I came along. If I wasn’t making her play the rational one she would have sunk her claws into you both, dragged you back to her den, and saved you for the long hard winter.”

It’s a silent fifteen minute ride from Columbia Grammar to their brownstone at 24 East 78th Street. Leona puts them into a taxi with a congenial (and slightly mischievous) look etched into her weathered face, clutching ermine to her neck as she assures them she would wait for the car to be brought around and then telling her to just _take the rest of the damn day off, Mac._

She should.

Charlotte deserves a quiet afternoon at home, but she has a meeting with the Vice President of Morning Programming and the ACN Morning anchors and if she’s to pretend at all like she doesn’t still harbor deep loathing for Tony Hart she can’t reschedule it for a third time.

But it’s an early meeting; Mac glances at her watch as the taxi driver turns off of East 85th and onto Madison Avenue. She can get Charlotte cleaned up, take her to AWM to make the 1:30 meeting, and have her back home by three. All she has for the rest of the day after that is a teleconference with her executive producers down in DC.

Still, she feels like a horrible mother for dragging Charlotte all over Manhattan.

“Honey, do you mind if we go to AWM for a bit?”

Charlotte shrugs, pulling her scarf up around her mouth.

Sighing, Mac tips her head back against the back seat of the cab.

A few minutes later, they’re home, and Mac keeps her arm wrapped snugly around Charlotte’s shoulders as they walk up the steps to their front door. Even as she fishes her keys out of her purse, next unlocking the iron grate and then their solid oak front door, she holds Charlotte against her side.

They remain silent as Mac drops her keys in the dish on the table in the foyer and shrugs off her jacket — so silent that Mac’s heels can be heard clicking loudly on the parquet floor.

“Mommy?”

Her eldest daughter is — like the rest of her children — in the 98th and 99th percentiles when it comes to growth. And beyond being long of torso and long-limbed, Charlotte is built far sturdier than she ever was.

But in the grey autumn light of their entryway, she looks smaller than her eight years.

“Hmm?” She walks back over to the door, closing and locking it.

Charlotte’s limbs are pliable to her efforts to remove her dark woolen peacoat from her, and then her pink hat, and scarf, and gloves until she’s left in just her school uniform.

Mac has no idea if she should be overreacting or underreacting or if she’s reacting just right — what’s the proper protocol for when an entitled brat thinks he gets to get grabby with your pre-pubescent daughter? The parenting books never covered this one.

“Am I in trouble?” Charlotte asks, blinking up at her.

“No, honey. No.” Bending at the waist, she places her hands on Charlotte’s shoulders. “You did exactly what I would have wanted you to do. Someone puts their hands on you, and you don’t like it — you do what you have to do to get their hands off you.”

“Oh.”

She looks dazed, Mac thinks. Confused. But she doesn’t know how much she should explain — it’s likely she feels violated. She doubts that she knows why. Or maybe she does; Charlotte knows better than to touch someone when they don’t want to be touched, occasional sibling tussles aside.

Does she wait for Charlotte to ask questions? The last thing she wants to do is open up a big wide world of paranoia for the child. Maybe as far as Charlotte’s concerned, Aiden is just a bully and his parents are jerks. Maybe she should just let it stay at that until she knows for certain that Charlotte is thinking otherwise.

Murmuring something about getting changed, she starts getting Charlotte upstairs. “Did Daddy really tell you not to talk to anyone without a lawyer present?”

She shrugs again. “Only if I was in big trouble.”

Charlotte’s bedroom is up on the third floor; they take their time on the steps. She might want to move Charlotte along, but she already feels poorly enough about making her go to AWM. The morning crew can just wait.

Instead, Mac watches Charlotte’s small hand as it slides up the bannister. Her fingernails are covered in flaking red nail polish — Mac painted them herself, well over a week ago. She makes a note to get out the cotton balls and acetone tonight.

Charlotte slows at the landing.

“Are you okay?”

She taps her fingernails on the bannister. “I don’t wanna go back to school.”

“Well, it’s Thursday.” Inwardly, she cringes. But she’ll make good on her threat to Aldrich back in his office. If what it takes for Charlotte to like school again is going to a _different_ school, she’s sure she can get Will on board with transferring her, if he doesn't just suggest it himself. But she tries not to think too far ahead. Charlotte hasn't mentioned anything yet about never going back. “I can see if I can work from home tomorrow. Besides, I told Headmaster Aldrich that you wouldn’t be going back until Daddy and I met with him, so I sort of have to make good on that one.”

Placing her hand in the dip between Charlotte’s shoulder blades, she ushers her into her bedroom.

“When does Daddy come home?”

“Depending on what happens in the news, he might be home tomorrow night through Sunday. If not then, then Tuesday.”

But after he learns about what happened today, she doubts Will is going to do anything but be on the first flight to JFK after tomorrow night’s show.

Leggings. Short-sleeved blouse. Long sweater. Warm socks. Boots. Exhaling through pursed lips, she stands with her hands on her hips in Charlotte’s closet, selecting clothes. Black, white, and purple. Grey boots. The tall pink socks she likes, the ones with the little brown Scottie dogs on them.

Josie fights her every morning, but Charlotte is fine with letting her pick out outfits to wear. And not that she doesn’t just step back and let Josie choose her own clothes (God knows it’s what she had to do when Charlotte was four, too, before she suddenly mellowed out after kindergarten), but it’s nice in its own way that Charlotte likes when she does this.

There’s something quiet and thoughtful inside their oldest child that she has trouble placing.

Maybe it’s a piece of Will that got beaten out of him when he was young.

Clothes in hand, she walks back into Charlotte’s bedroom. For a moment she looks at the soft Peter Rabbit mural on the wall rather than directly at her daughter, and lays the clothes softly on top of her bed, smoothing them out with her hands.

Charlotte’s already stripped down to her underwear with a sort of efficiency with regards to getting naked that only a child can have, so Mac kneels to help her step into her leggings.

(Not that she needs any aid. But she’s going through these motions with a thick cloud of cotton in her head; they might be all that’s keeping her grounded right now. The anger from the Headmaster’s office has diluted into sadness.

 _How dare the Jaycox boy._ It would have been better, she thinks, if he had just left a bruise instead of his fingerprints.)

“Is Dad gonna be mad?” Charlotte asks, buttoning up the front of her clean blouse.

Mac’s brows furrow together. “Why would he be mad, sweetheart?”

“He said to never hit. Ever. And I wasn’t even sorry.”

For a few seconds, her troubled face is hidden by the sweater that is being helped over her head; she and Will might have better prepared their children for a world in which they might actually have to put up a fight. But most parents, she assumes, hope that their children don’t find out about the people who want to hurt them for a good long while.

“I know he’ll make an exception for you this time,” she replies, her tone leaving no room for dissension.

Settling the shoulders of the sweater into place, she leans down to kiss the top of Charlotte’s head. Her eyes find the brush on the dresser, but she decides against it, rather leading Charlotte down a flight of stairs and to hers and Will’s bedroom to seat her at her vanity before stepping out of her Louboutins.

Her own hairbrush was her mother’s before her, a Mason Pearson studded with eight rings of boar bristles and a dark ruby-colored handle. It was something of a fascination to her when she was a girl, and it was gifted to her when the news broke across the Atlantic that Lady McHale’s precious MacKenzie was having a daughter of her own.

Keeping her fingers delicate, she extracts the bow from Charlotte’s hair, teasing the clip out from her honey blonde strands before sliding the rubber band out from crown to her ends.

Then slowly, she begins to draw the brush through her daughter’s waves.

“Mrs. Haig told Headmaster Aldrich that my skirt broke the dress code,” she whispers, cheeks pinkening as she looks at Mac in the mirror. “But it doesn’t. It’s way longer than my fingertips.”

Mac outwardly cringes, this time. But her hands don’t falter on the journey from Charlotte’s roots to the curled ends of her hair.

“Charlotte Harper, you are _not_ in trouble,” she says firmly.

Mrs. Haig is about to be, though. And what the _fuck,_ they couldn’t have Charlotte wait outside until she got there? Did the Haigs race in and hope they could get in before her to start the spin machine on their son’s shitty behavior?

“She said I shouldn’t have gone on the monkey bars in a skirt,” she continues, shrugging. “Mr. Haig said I wasn’t dressed responsibly. That I knew Aiden could see my panties. But I didn't. I wasn't thinking about that.”

Okay, she definitely is going to _have a word_ with the Haigs. And that fuckweasel child is not going to be allowed within two city blocks of Charlotte. Or any girl, for that matter. _Just a crush._ Pursing her lips, Mac counts the strokes of the brush as it glides through thick strands of dark blonde hair.

Just a fucking crush.

(Wincing, she shoves down hers and Will’s years of toxic codependency. Did she pass on some horrific predisposition? Or is the fact that she and Will both went to therapy and moved on past their issues before having children enough?

Is she a horrible mother for not thinking of this before letting her around older boys, that there might be one who would chose the smaller girl to prey upon? _It’s different,_ she remembers trying to explain to Will. _It’s different, for girls._ Different with girls, too, she thinks. Remembers Will's panic attacks at the thought of raising a son.)

Because girls are meant to be used and crinkled up like tissue once they stop reciprocating, or at least stop putting up with your idiocy.

“You are dressed fine the way you are. Do you think Dad and I would let you out of the house if you weren’t?” she finally says, before another detail strikes her. “Who taught you how to punch like that?”

“Auntie Sloan.” She’s gifted with another shrug. “She said girls have to know how to defend themselves. She taught me when I slept over at hers and Uncle Don’s.”

Mac nods. “When?”

“I don’t know.” Charlotte picks at her nail polish, leaning back until her head hits Mac’s middle and grabbing for the brush; Mac lets her have it. She counted more than fifty strokes. “She just did.”

Her smaller fingers pluck at the bristles, fingertips passing over the nylon caps that soften their feel against the scalp.

“Do you want a ponytail or braid?” Mac gathers her hair off her shoulders, combing her fingers through it.

“Braid please, Momma.”

Honestly, after raising two younger sisters, Will is better at French braids than she is. Even at boarding school she could never catch on. Still, her fingers try to make deft work of it as she glances at the clock — she’s definitely going to be late to her meeting.

Charlotte catches her eye in the vanity’s mirror. “If we stay home, can we get cakes from Lady M’s?”

“I think you deserve one.” Mac forces herself to smile, but finds that she doesn’t have to really force it at all. “Just don’t tell Teddy and Josie we went without them.”

Lady M Confections is just the sort of pretentious Upper East Side bakery that Will disavows — but it’s just down the block from them, hardly a five minute walk. (And like he ever _really_ complains, he of the endless sweet tooth.) It’s dreadfully overpriced and as a rule, crowded. But the kids love the éclairs and to MacKenzie’s ear the sound of her children clumsily botching the names of French cakes and pastries is too adorable to pass up.

She longs to see Charlotte’s smiling lips try to form _gateau au chocolat,_ so perhaps they will go tomorrow.

“We could bring something home for them,” Charlotte says, swinging her feet.

“Very good.” She ties off the end of the braid, clipping her bow over the elastic. “Good thinking. Perhaps we’ll get a whole cake, for everyone to share.”

Charlotte leans back again, this time eschewing the mirror to lean her head back against Mac’s stomach, looking straight up at her. “What if we just eat a whole cake, the two of us?”

“Do you think we can?” She brushes Charlotte’s bangs out of her face, looking down at her wide angular cheekbones, the soft curvature of her jaw, her undecided nose.

“Teddy and Jojo still might find the box in the garbage.”

“Then we would be trouble.”

“We should probably share the cake,” she says. “And save a slice for Daddy, in case he comes home.”

Content for now that her daughter’s mind is eased with the promise of confections, Mac sweeps them both back downstairs, bundles them back into their jackets, and leads them back outside to hail a cab to make their way downtown to the AWM building.

It’s not until they’re safely ensconced in a warm taxi when a fresh pang of dread appears in her stomach, when she remembers that she still has to call Will and tell him what happened.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	2. let it fill up 'til i can't see at all

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** Thank you all to everyone who read and commented or left kudos for the first part. Again, the chapter title comes from Vienna Teng's "Now Three." And no promises, but I might write a coda featuring Mac and Charlotte on the couch eating cake. Who knows. Maybe I can do fluff. 
> 
> Many thanks to Pippa. <3

“Hey Mac — Charlie’s downstairs with Neal. He came up to drop off the ACN digital reports you asked for and offered to let her play Galaga on his computer.” Millie pauses from typing at her computer to hand her a stack of pink message slips.

Mac takes a quick look at who called while she was out, marveling as always how quickly these things pile up when she’s out of the building for a few hours, and then pushes the door open to her office.

“Thanks.” She stops, looking back at Millie. “Hold any calls from anyone and — well, anyone who shows up, for the next thirty minutes.” Almost stepping all the way through again, she reconsiders. “Unless it’s one of my kids.”

Millie nods. “Of course.”

Pulling the door closed behind her, Mac looks forlornly at her desk.

This isn’t a phone call she wants to make. But she knows that it has to be done; she and Will talk on the phone three times a day when one of them is travelling so it’s _going to happen_ regardless, whether or not she’s still looking to sharpen her metaphorical claws to sink into _someone’s_ skin until they concede to leaving her child well and enough alone. And _then_ she’ll make them hurt for their transgressions.

Sadness and rage and the blurred line in between.

Contorting her features into a caricature of an angered expression, she hangs up her blazer, and drops down into her desk chair.

Will picks up on the third ring, as she’s halfway through an email to Jim and Don warning them to brace for impact. She barely gets an explanation out of her mouth before—

“What the _fuck?”_

“I know.”

“Is she okay?” he asks, after a long silence. “Do you need me to come home?”

“No, right now she's just…” She isn't certain if this is something they should make a big deal out of to Charlotte. “She's not going to school tomorrow. I think she knows something happened and she feels anxious now, but I don't want to make it worse by hovering and making her think I'm waiting for her to have a meltdown.”

“I meant more for ripping the school administrators a new one.”

“Oh. That can wait until Wednesday.” With a sense of growing impatience, she logs onto her computer. She was hoping the Headmaster or the Dean would have emailed her with the details of Aiden’s disciplinary action, or at least asking for hers and Will’s availability for a Wednesday meeting. “I already tore into them a bit.”

Her inbox isn’t empty (it never is, anymore) but none of the emails are from anyone with a Columbia email.

“I mean I figured,” he says, and then exhales heavily. “Fuck, she really broke his nose?”

“I've seen my fair share of broken noses so I'm gonna give you a hard yes,” she answers, stubbornly refreshing her inbox, biting her lip. “Is it bad that I saw all the blood on this kid’s shirt and was proud of her?”

Will laughs joylessly. “Hell, _I'm_ proud of her.”

Not that she expected him to say anything different; it’s still a relief to hear the words in his voice. It’s one hundred percent confirmation bias (not to mention a dozen other biases) to go to him for support on this one, but she’s beyond being anything but entirely behind Charlotte’s actions today.

“She was afraid you'd be mad,” she says. “What does it mean that she pegged me as the parent who'd be more fine with her beating someone up?”

“Why did she think I'd be mad?” He sounds genuinely nonplussed.

She understands part of his confusion. but she knows why Charlotte thinks of him the way she does; Will has always managed to keep his temper around the children better than she has. But the converse implication of that is that the children don’t really see him as anything but soft and squishy, barring the occasional _News Night_ rant.

“For some reason she thinks you're a pacifist. Her felon father.”

“Hey! That was for a nonviolent offense.”

She manages a laugh.

“You know, when I first got the call and they didn't say who it was right away, I sort of thought Teddy got into a fight because someone said something about Josie during recess or Josie got mad at someone cheating off her test and pushed them out of their chair.” She thinks she might be less upset about those, too. Not that she’s upset at Charlotte, not at all. It’s just all so _unfair,_ and it’s got her unfocused; she really has no idea how she got through her meeting with ACN Morning. “No, just Charlotte. Breaking a boy's nose like a goddamn Wonder Woman. Where did she get the nerve?”

Down the phone line, his tone softens considerably. “From her mother.”

A hard lump forms in her throat.

“Well, it's good to know that she's not a doormat.”

“We knew that already,” he says offhandedly, and then says nothing for a few seconds — she can hear his brain working this all over. “Who are this kid's parents again?”

“Ramsey and Karen Haig. Gage Whitney and some interior design firm I'd never heard of. I already called a contact I have at Gage.”

Tucking her hair behind her ear, she decides to see what a Google search for Karen Haig turns up — spreads in upper middle class magazines, it seems. Her name mentioned in the captions of high society events. A few quotes about drapery and ambience and the importance of personalized monograms.

“I know Gage and Whitney themselves,” Will says, turning contemplative. When he speaks again, his voice has a determined, if not slightly manic, edge to it. “I'll mention something about how unimpressed I am by the way the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School handled my daughter being assaulted by another student, drop in the name.”

“Are we really going to go to a lawyer about this?” It may be her years in the Middle East speaking, but the law isn’t exactly the route she wants to go. And besides. “Because I’m pretty sure we were mocking those kinds of parents a year ago. Now we’re _becoming_  those parents.”

 _Charlotte can handle herself,_ she keeps telling herself. But also keeps reminding herself: _but she shouldn’t have to yet. This wasn’t just schoolyard teasing._ Swallowing hard, she scrolls through the search results for Aiden’s mother, coming upon a much older article announcing her first marriage to a Ryan Jaycox. She grimaces when she comes upon a date of birth for Karen Haig — are she and Will really _that_ much older than some of the other parents at the kids’ school?

Will huffs. “I really wanna fucking ruin this asshole's year and I don’t want to go away for wringing his neck, so here we have the next best thing.”

For the first time, Mac wonders where in the DC studio Will is taking this call.

“God, I wanted to kill the douchebag stepfather. After Charlotte told me what he said before I got there I really wish I had.” She copies and pastes Ryan Jaycox into the LexisNexis search function.

“We could sue them.”

“That's not nearly as satisfying as making them bleed. Which, coincidentally, Charlotte already did to Aiden.”

God, she really is proud — she learned long ago that motherhood has an element of blood sport to it but she never thought she’d be almost gleeful at the fact that her daughter broke someone’s nose to defend herself. It’s a heady rush of emotions: fear and disgust, glee and rage. Sharpening and honing parts of herself into folded steel, and then saving the other parts to be softened and smooth for her children to hide in.

“I can't fucking believe they wanted to suspend her,” he says, and then lets out a stream of curses under his breath. His anger is finally taking root — Mac looks on her display screen at how long the call has been going on and isn’t surprised at all.

“I know.”

“I'm gonna tear Aldrich a new one. I swear if they don’t have — goddammit it’s sexual misconduct. Fuck. _Fuck._ Fucking hell!” She thinks he drops his cell phone, or throws it against something; something clatters on the other end of the line and she can hear him shouting, but not exactly what he’s saying. After a minute, he returns, seething. “I’m going to rewrite the student code of conduct myself, and then shove it up his ass.”

Mac exhales through pursed lips, trying to ignore the tears prickling the corners of her eyes. “I found his mother. She's an interior designer for an event planning service on the Upper East Side.”

“Is the brat's biological father in the picture?”

“If I have the right man—”

“Which you do.”

“Which I do, he's a high-ranking political consultant at Lockheed Martin in DC.” She pulls up one of the LexisNexis articles on defense contract negotiations and spending at the Pentagon.  

“Can I _please_ bring him into the studio for a segment?” he asks with a sardonic laugh. “Military contractors, the war in Ukraine, debate over defense contracts and privatization of—”

“Okay I'm going to stop you right there.”

He heaves a harsh sigh that creates a burst of static in her ear. “Not subtle?”

“National humiliation on primetime cable? As subtle as a baseball bat to the skull.” Not that she doesn’t appreciate his enthusiasm. “I mean we don't even know how often he sees his son. I'm more preoccupied with the ones who insinuated that our eight year old dresses like she's trying to turn tricks on the corner of 23rd and Lexington and her poor son—”

She cringes at herself, her stomach churning with effervescent fury and revulsion. On the other end of the line all she can hear is Will’s strained breathing. All that is spoken between them is silent anger.

“Which one of them — she is _eight_ years old.”

“I know.” She bites her lip.

“Tell me what they said.”

“It seems that before I got there, the Haigs were making... remarks about how Charlotte was dressed. Skirt too short, wanted him to see up her…” Mac can’t force herself to finish that sentence, her voice trailing off into a mire of disgust.

The door opens, startling her. Looking up, she expects to see her daughter peering through the doorway. Instead, she sees an unapologetic Leona pushing through, Rebecca a step behind. And then Millie, behind them, emphatically mouthing _I’m sorry,_ over and over again.

Mac waves her off, gesturing her to close the door.

Settling into one of the chairs across from her, Leona gives Mac a sort of gesture that plainly lets her know that she doesn’t expect her to hang up. Mac looks at Rebecca with an air of suspicion — did Leona really call in a lawyer for this?

In her ear, Will lets out a nonverbal sound of derision.

“Boys will be boys,” Mac says flippantly, spitting the words out of her mouth.

Will explodes. “Are you fucking with me?”

“I wish.”

“Do they not know they _we_ have a son?” he asks, almost at a shout, and then doesn’t give her any time to answer. “Did they say anything else? Did Charlotte say—?”

“I think they stopped short of calling our little girl a tease, if that's what you're asking.”

Rebecca raises her eyebrows high towards her hairline, giving Leona an askance look before taking a long drink from her Starbucks cup.

After a long pause, Will’s tone has shifted to a gentler shade of anger. Just as unyielding, but now directed into a font of protectiveness. “Is she there?”

Mac figures that he doesn’t mean Leona or Rebecca. “She's hanging out with Neal and Jenna downstairs. I gave her the tablet to keep herself occupied during my meeting, but Neal dropped something off for me and saw Charlotte was in my office. Millie said he said she could play the games he thinks we don't know that he managed to install on his computer.”

There’s another gap in conversation, this one more natural, less tense.

"Does it seem like she doesn't — I mean we can't just ask her to pretend all is normal and send her right back to class,” Will says, more thinking out loud than anything else.

“She mentioned earlier, not wanting to go back. But it was just once. I don’t know.” Mac sighs; she doesn’t want Charlotte developing any of her own neuroses over this. Odds are, she’ll develop enough contact neuroses just from being raised by her and Will. “I mean, it happened in front of the entire class.”

“Should we ask her?”

“I don't think we should make a big deal out of it unless she does,” she reiterates. “I think she's just confused about what happened and feeling... whatever that she had to punch someone. And scared. God, she was terrified when I got there.”

It’s not as if she fell on the playground and scraped her elbows and knees, or had a nightmare. This was another person, trying to hurt her. And her trying to lash out to defend herself, and learning for the first time how little some people could care about what happens to her. And she wasn’t _there_. Not at first.

The tears that were first stinging the corners of her eyes now blur and obscure her vision.

“Give her and hug and kiss for me.”

“I will.”

“I'm sorry I wasn't — I swear, I'm in DC every time something happens.”

She gives him a watery laugh. “Or prison.”

“That was _not_ my fault,” Rebecca mutters.

“One time,” he retorts, but warmly. “I love you. I'll call later to talk to the kids. Before bedtime.”

She’ll have to ask him about apparently teaching the kids about their Miranda rights then, with Charlotte to back up her end of the story. “Love you too. Don't fuck up tonight, the kids and I will be watching.”

Leona snorts; MacKenzie just tries to ignore the fact that she’s near tears in front of Leona. Rebecca, at least, has seen her cry before. Just not in almost a decade.

“I'll get Tess to book me a flight home tomorrow night,” Will promises, and in a way that suggests that even if she told him not to worry about it he’d be turning the lock on their front door by midnight tomorrow regardless.

“I figured as much.” she says. Then, eyeing the two women sitting in her office, sighs. “Okay, go.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

The call ends.

Without warning, her cheeks are awash with tears. _Fuck,_ she thinks, squeezing her eyes shut. Mindful of her audience, she takes a deep breath and reaches for the box of tissues on her desk. The first wave of tears passes, but a second rises up to replace it. Then a third, and fourth, and she is _really_ trying to not to end up weeping at her desk.

It takes a minute, but she gets it under control.

“You alright there?” Leona asks, entirely unfazed by the display of emotion.

Mac sighs, tipping her head back and rolling her shoulders.

“Yeah.” Blinking rapidly, she tries to chase all vulnerabilities from her face. “Yeah, I’m fine.” Donning a weak grin, she turns to Rebecca. “Please tell me that Leona didn’t bring you here to file a lawsuit against a nine year old?”

She shrugs. “I’m just here because she promised to take me to Per Se for date night.”

“I honestly thought you’d forgotten where my office is,” Mac says, looking back to Leona.

“I had Reese draw us a map,” she replies breezily, and without missing a beat. “You hear anything from the school?”

“Not yet.”

It feels like she should have. She refreshes her inbox.

“They can’t possibly punish her for what happened,” Leona continues.

“They’d better fucking not,” Mac says, with more vehemence in her voice that anticipated. And then just says _fuck it_ because if Leona and Rebecca don’t understand where she’s coming from, then no one does. “I _have_ a son. I can’t imagine raising Teddy to think that it’s okay to — that boy was treating her like she was public property. And then making excuses for him if he — you know what, I hate to be that mother but honestly, Teddy would _never._ ” Her mind stops then, a vacuum of thought appearing as the need to catch her breath eclipses everything else. Swallowing past the hard mass in her throat, she continues.“Will and I raised him better than that, and I know that he wouldn’t. I _know_ my son. I just can’t imagine raising a boy to think it’s _funny_ to make a girl frightened like that boy did to Charlotte. He almost took her shirt off, for fuck’s sake! Is this what happens when you only have one boy? You forget about the girls?”

Rebecca puts her Starbucks cup down to rest on the arm of the chair, and then turns to look expectantly at Leona.

“Fuck no!” Leona says, leaning forward and brandishing an index finger forward. “And I’ll tell you what, if that woman tries to pull any of that shit you let me know and I’ll—”

Her voice falters.

“What will you do Lee?” Becca asks, smirking.

“You know what, Becca—”

Mac almost laughs, almost gives up a real laugh, but doesn’t quite feel up to it yet. Resting her chin her hands, she asks, “Did you go through anything like this, with Reese?”

“When he was this young? No. God no.” Leona shakes her head emphatically. “And then his father wanted him sent away to an all-boy boarding school when the hormones got going. Which, to be honest, is why I blame my ex-husband entirely for the fact that I’ve been forced to appropriate your children for my own nefarious purposes. Reese has no idea how to talk to women.”

Becca snorts into her Starbucks cup again.

“Is that why he resorted into hacking into my voicemail?” MacKenzie asks, blanching the expression on her face and raising an eyebrow.

Leona waves her off.

“Bygones.”

“Seriously, you made him Teddy’s godfather,” Rebecca points out. And then sits back, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Why _did_ you do that?”

“Hormones and exhaustion and he'd just promised me he’d buy ACN back by the end of the year,” Mac answers quickly, operating under the familiar assumption that if she hastens the words from her mouth that no one will question them. “Mostly the crazy postpartum hormones.”

Leona balks, jabbing her finger at a completely unperturbed Rebecca’s direction. “So? _She’s_ Teddy’s godmother! What’s your excuse there?”

“She got Will out of federal prison.” Mac shrugs. She’d just pushed out a ten pound baby. There was no way she was going to listen to Will’s suggestions for godparents; Rebecca Halliday was visiting, irritating to her husband, and conveniently Catholic.

Also she filed the motion that got his ass out of prison.

“See?” Rebecca asks. Leona’s response is to scoff and adjust the strand of pearls around her neck.

Once again, the door opens. Much more slowly, this time. Cautiously, Charlotte sticks her head into the room, observing its occupants, her fingers wrapped tightly around the door handle. Mac perks up, straightening her spine.

“Hi sweetie,” she says. “Where have you been?”

Charlotte rocks back and forth on her heels, balancing herself against the door.

“Uncle Neal let me play Galaga on his computer and then Aunt Jenna let me look at her bridal magazines and then Miss Lauren from wardrobe took me to look at the new dresses she bought for Auntie Sloan and Aunt Maggie to wear when they come back for Election Night,” she replies, all in one large gulp of air. Swallowing, and then blowing her bangs out of her face, she then says, “But they all had to go back to work and I got bored so I came back up here.”

She bounds into the room, half-jumping and half-running to Leona and then leans up onto her tiptoes, and presses a kiss of Leona’s cheek.

“I hear we have a warrior in our midst,” Rebecca says, after a moment.

Blushing, Charlotte lowers herself to stand on flat feet.

“You should see the other guy,” Leona says, wrapping an arm around Charlotte before raising her arm like has been done to many a heavyweight champion. “Knuckles of brass.”

Mac watches as Charlotte squirms, and then giggles, as Leona tickles her sides.

Rebecca watches the two of them with a look that could easily pass as fondness. “Did Will really tell her not to talk without an attorney present?”

“So it seems.” Mac returns her chin to rest in her hands, moving the conversation on Miranda rights from something she should _probably_ do to something she’s going to _definitely_ do when Will calls later.

“Huh.”

“Daddy said that if we talk to people without a lawyer, someone nasty might try to in-crim-in-ate us,” Charlotte explains very matter-of-factly, holding her head high. “So we’re ‘sposed to wait for him or Momma, if we ever get in trouble and they’ll take care of it.”

Rebecca nods, face colored with something like pleasant surprise. “I’m impressed.”

Fingers laced at her middle, Charlotte walks over to Rebecca but stops just short of her. “What have you got?” she asks, looking down at the Starbucks cup.

“Caramel macchiato.” She holds the cup up as an offering. “You want some?”

“Yes please.” Mac winces; she wonders what people make of the fact that all of her children already know and love coffee and espresso. Charlotte takes a large gulp from the paper travel cup, and then hands it back — Rebecca gives her a kiss on the forehead in kind. Then, Charlotte cocks her head with an inquisitive turn. “Are there people with knuckles made of brass? Is it like how my Daddy’s knees are made of titanium?”

“Grandma Lee’s just trying to be funny. Trying.” Rebecca pats Charlotte on her back, and sends her over to Mac. “You’re a lucky girl, you know. You mom’s a good one to have on your side when jail is on the line.”

Mac rolls her eyes over the top of Charlotte’s — who is in the process of climbing into her lap — head.

“Ha-ha,” she deadpans, twining her arms tight around her daughter. Then holds her even more tightly, until Charlotte swings her legs up over her thigh.

“What?” Rebecca protests. “I was being serious.”

Mac sighs.

And then buries her nose in Charlotte’s hair.

Rests her chin on top of her crown.

“Are you two heading home soon?” Leona asks, seemingly ignoring them all. Or perhaps just her and Rebecca, because her eyes are honed sharply on her pilfered grandchild. Although, Mac thinks (and not for the first time) that Leona has enough personality to make up for both of Will’s parents, and then some. “I thought I told you to not even come back here. I want my grandbaby home and getting spoiled. Why are you here?”

“I had to,” she replies, because it’s quicker than reiterating her usual diatribe of complaints against ACN Morning, especially with Charlotte here to overhear. Glancing down at her watch, she estimates how much time she has before the nanny brings her other children home, and sighs again. “But yeah, we’re about to head out. Have some quiet time before Teddy and Josie come home.”

Leona stands, and then with a pointed look, gets Rebecca to stand too.

“We’ll leave you to it,” she says.

Rebecca turns to leave first, but is delayed by Leona stooping over Mac’s desk to grab one of lollipops out of the candy jar (reserved for children, and for when her employees decide to _act_ like children), unwrap it, and pop it into her mouth. She gives Charlotte a little wave that is dutifully returned, and then grabs Rebecca’s arm on their way out.

Slowly, the glass door swings closed again.

Charlotte buries her face against her neck. Idle now, mind emptying out in an unconscious attempt to rid herself of some of the day's anxiety, Mac finds herself toying with Charlotte’s braid. Eventually, the pads of fingers find the small grosgrain bow at the end. Its powdery pink, and she first put it on Charlotte’s ponytail while doing her hair at her vanity this morning as Josie got dressed on the bed. Looking more closely at it now, she can see that the edges are frayed, one tail ripped up the center. But the small two-pronged clip is still intact, fastened to the hair elastic keeping Charlotte’s braid together.

There are dozens of more bows just like it in a little wire box atop her vanity, but the ruination of this one still angers her.

Her hand passes down Charlotte’s shoulders, her arms, her fingers furling gently around her wrist. The divots between Charlotte’s fingers are red and swollen, the skin stretched over the fine bones of her hand mottled. Mac supposes that her daughter couldn’t have thought to hit Aiden Jaycox with her fingers, instead of her knuckles.

But it does explain his broken nose.

“Your hand okay?” she asks, bringing the appendage up for her inspection.

“It’s sore,” Charlotte answers, squirming a bit. She takes her free hand and puts it to her lip, a single finger pressing in against the wide cut splitting it. “My mouth hurts.” She removes the finger, looking at Mac with wide eyes, and then looks down at her hand as if she’s noticed the discoloration for the first time. “Is it gonna bruise?”

Mac looks at it more intently, squinting rather than reaching for her glasses.

“It might,” she says, trying to under-react. It almost definitely will bruise, if her fingers already look like that. “We’ll ice it when we get home. Dad and I have both had bruised knuckles. But they heal.”

“When did you punch people?” Charlotte asks. “Was it when you were with the Marines?”

“What sort of stories is Uncle Jim telling you?” She eyes her daughter somewhat warily; if Jim was in control of the narrative, he’d have her single-handedly winning the Iraq War, which is definitely something _no one_ won. But she supposes if she continues to be vague about her time as an embed that her colleagues enjoy bringing up, the kids will continue going to other credible sources for information about it. “I didn’t knock out Bin Laden or anybody like that, but there were times that I had to defend myself. Times when I didn’t do such a good job. You’ve seen the scars. But I’ve fought probably more than my fair share of people.”

There’s just no good way to explain to the children that Mommy and Daddy had a horrible, horrible break-up and then spent several years going on individual destructive spirals, and that while her two Peabody’s that she won from behind enemy lines will forever be everyone’s first line when they’re introducing her — and probably the first line of her obituary, shortly followed by _and then returned to be the Executive Producer of News Night with (her husband) Will McAvoy, quickly ascending to the position of President of ACN over the course of the next three years_ — it’s not a time of her life she particularly wants to _revisit._

Charlotte’s hair smells sweet, like lavender and vanilla.

Measuring her breaths, Mac supposes what every mother wants is for her children to never have to defend themselves. And if they have to, that the illusion of safety isn’t shattered at the tender age of eight.

She’s not sure when she became fully aware of the dangers of the world — perhaps she’s always known, travelling with her parents to live in East Berlin and Moscow, Astana and Damascus. The luxurious embassy houses locked behind guarded fences. Rioters at the gates, nightly rounds of gunshots. Death threats and overthrown governments. And then watching her father leave for Kabul. The long terse months in London. The several long years alone in a boarding school in DC, after her mother decided to join him. She wanted her children to have the kingdom of childhood, where everyone is safe and no one dies and nothing is wanted for.

And then fucking Aiden Jaycox and his horrid mother and father.

“I’m really not in trouble?” Charlotte asks, picking at Mac’s necklace.

“Charlie, in a perfect world you wouldn’t have to hit anyone, and I would be very happy,” Mac says, after a moment. “And I know that Aiden didn’t… try to kick you, or cause you physical pain. But what he did was very wrong, and it’s a way of harming people that makes them feel unsafe and less than human. And it can lead to you being in physical harm. You told him to stop, didn’t you?”

Charlotte just blinks.

“Yeah.”

“And did he stop?”

“No.”

“Is that when you punched him?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you’re not in trouble,” she finishes decisively, mourning the fact that there is no means of explaining to Charlotte that what Aiden did, what his parents said, is its own form of violence. The _doubts_ that they’ve now put into Charlotte’s head. About her own status as a human being in her own right. “No one can touch you without your permission.”

Charlotte’s head tilts; for not the first time, Mac could laugh at how much she looks like Will when something puzzles her.

“Even you and Daddy?”

Turning her lips into a small smile, she tucks a lock of escaped hair behind Charlotte’s ear. “Even me and Daddy. You are not a thing. You don’t belong to us. You don’t belong to anyone.”

When Charlotte is unaware of the depth of this statement, Mac knows that not everything has been ruined for her.

“Okay, but like… you don’t have to ask me for permission. I like when you and Daddy hug me,” she says slowly. “You should keep hugging me.”

“Okay.” Mac smiles. “I wasn’t planning on stopping.”

“Good.”

Mac pulls Charlotte even more snugly against her, almost to prove the point. They sit quietly for a long while. She promised Leona that they were leaving, but she’s loathe to interrupt this moment. But she does, when an email from _jfairfax@columbia.edu_ shows up in her inbox.

Careful to make sure that Charlotte isn’t paying attention, she picks up her BlackBerry and opens the email app.

_Ms. McHale and Mr. McAvoy,_

_I am emailing to let you both know that I am taking this matter very seriously, and am very disappointed Headmaster Aldrich and Dean Peterson did not allow me to speak with you when Ms. McHale was in the school earlier. I have asked that Aiden not be allowed back in my class and that the matter be escalated to the full disciplinary board. Charlotte is the third student that he has targeted with his “affections” since the beginning of the school year, although his actions today with Charlotte were the furthest he has gone._

_Not that that is an excuse for failing to prevent what happened, either. I am incredibly sorry for my part in what happened to Charlotte. When they both first came into the classroom this morning, Charlotte very plain put her foot down asking Aiden to stay away from her, which I am afraid enticed him to more harmful actions than before — which is why I have asked the disciplinary board consider removing Aiden from the school entirely. Between you and me, I had written home via email on two separate occasions to his parents notifying them of his behaviors towards the girls in the classroom, and asked them to come in and meet with me. They declined both times. I have shared this information with the Headmaster and the Dean._

_I have just spoken with Headmaster Aldrich and Dean Peterson and have learned that Aiden had touched Charlotte during recess before his actions today. I am looking into if this behavior had been noticed or reported to any of the lunch aides or employees._

_Again, you and Charlotte all have my sincerest apologies. I am available by email and phone the rest of the day, and agree that we should all meet before Charlotte returns to class to ensure she is in an optimal learning environment._

_Best,  
J Fairfax_

Closing the email, she allows her phone to lock; she’s so relieved that she could cry. She lets herself take solace in the words of Charlotte’s teacher, closing her eyes until the wave of emotion ebbs.

And then she looks down at Charlotte, noticing the grimace on her small face.

“You okay, honey?” she asks, pressing a kiss to her temple.

“My tummy hurts.”

Charlotte bites her lip, and frowns.

“You wanna go home?” Anxiety, Mac thinks. They both have rights to be anxious after today. “I’ll make you some tea and honey and tuck you into the couch. We can watch a movie,” she suggests, and rocks Charlotte in her arms. Rather awkwardly, considering her recent growth spurt, but she makes it work. “That sound good?”

Stiltedly, she nods.

“Okay,” Mac whispers.

Three pregnancies may have wreaked havoc her lower back, but she manages to push herself up out of her desk chair with Charlotte still in her arms. Making a small tired sound, Charlotte wraps her arms around her mother’s neck, presses her long legs around her waist.

Listening to the clock tick, MacKenzie stands still and pretends that her oldest child is still her baby.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	3. coda

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** A brief epilogue, for Pippa. I hope this helps with the day you've been having! For reference: the movie Mac and Charlotte are watching is _Scooby Doo and the Witch's Ghost_ , and the cake that they bought costs about eighty dollars for a nine-inch round. But Will shouldn't complain, considering all the shenanigans his black Amex has caused in canon.

The front door closes behind them with an aggrieved _thwack,_ the locks sliding into place with a sturdy sound shortly after.Outside the white limestone Upper East Side townhouse a cold icy rain batters down onto the city. Inside the townhouse, in the McAvoys’ bright airy foyer, stand MacKenzie and Charlotte — both equally drenched, and both breathless from their dash towards the indoors.

The cake in Charlotte’s hands, however, is perfectly dry.

Or one would assume, nestled safely inside the bakery box and a thick plastic bag.

“Mom?”

Water drips off Charlotte’s parka, collecting in a puddle at her feet. They had been almost two hundred feet from home when a thunderclap pealed overhead and the downpour began, and neither of them was entirely prepared for the sudden onslaught of weather. Which explains why the soles of Charlotte’s shoes squish with every step.

“Oh God, give that to me.” Laughing, Mac takes the cake from her daughter’s hands, and places it on top of the table in their entryway, haphazardly placing it besides the other things that have collected there — keys, unopened mail, library books.

Shoulders hunched, Charlotte shivers. “Cold!”

Despite herself, Mac laughs. Her poor baby must be soaked through; she probably should have checked the weather app on her phone before they left for Lady M’s since the sky has been threatening rain all morning.

Bouncing on her toes, Charlotte wrings out her hair and then tries to shake all the water off her hands. Then, she attempts a pout that goes very far awry, her lips turning up into a smile before a small giggle ratchets its way up her throat. Now pouting, and laughing, she looks up at Mac with an even worse attempt at big, pitiable eyes.

Mac smiles, ignoring the raindrops inching down her own back.

“Here, let’s get your jacket off you.” Leaning down, she tugs the parka off Charlotte’s arms. For a moment she wonders what to do with it — it’s too wet to hang in the closet. Grimacing, she crosses to the foyer’s tiny powder room, the parka _drip, drip, dripping_ on the hardwood floor, and deposits the jacket in the sink. “And those shoes,” she says, stripping off her own wool coat and deciding that it’s dry enough to at least hang on the rail at the bottom of the staircase.

Looking decidedly uncomfortable and wet, Charlotte stands next to her at the railing, using it for balance as she gets out of her sneakers.

“And maybe all of those clothes,” Mac says, eyeing her damp sweater and the dark patches on her jeans. “Why don’t you just change back into your pajamas? Those will get you nice and toasty warm.”

Charlotte ponders this.

“And then cake?”

Mac nods. “And then cake.”

For a few seconds, Charlotte rocks back and forth on her feet and then with a gale of laughter bolts up the stairs. Mac debates whether or not she wants to chase her up the stairs — Teddy spent the night in bed with her after a nightmare, and with Will not home and lying beside her she hasn’t had much sleep all week, so she’s quite exhausted from handling all of the parenting of their young three herself — and winds up settling for a middle ground of taking the stairs two steps at a time to the third floor master suite.

Charlotte has already launched herself onto the bed by the time Mac gets there, rooting through the pile of discarded pajamas from this morning that never quite made it all the way to the laundry chute.

“Are you gonna change too?” she asks, her hand wrapped around the yoga pants that Mac wore to bed the night before.

“Yeah.” Mac blinks, and then takes the pants. “Sure.”

She gave the nanny the day off, but she figures no one she cares about will truly give a shit if she picks up Teddy and Josie from school in something besides her usual pencil skirt and blouse. And Charlotte, in her pink fairy pajamas, can wait in the Suburban with the driver.

It’s not until she notices Charlotte starting at her that Mac realizes that she’s been staring off into space.

And realizes how fucking _tired_ she is.

“Cake?” Mac asks, trying to blink her way out of only having slept four hours last night. Half-desperate, she reminds herself that Will is supposed to be home soon after midnight. And then maybe she has a chance at getting a good night's sleep before the mad seventy-two hours before the midterms. 

Then Charlotte is off and running again, skipping her way down the stairs for the boxed Couronne du Chocolat in the foyer. Mac catches up with her as she’s climbing up on the children’s step stool in the kitchen, reaching for the dessert plates stacked in one of the cupboards. She lets Charlotte grab the plates, and the forks, and balance them both atop the Lady M Confections box, but draws the line at handling the knife.

That she does herself.

They wind up cuddled together in the living room, the cake still in its box on the coffee table, and the coffee table pulled flush against the couch where they sit. The ideas of _plates_ and _cutting_ are quickly discarded in favor of just digging into chocolate sponge and dark chocolate mousse and decadent ganache with their forks — a motion proposed by Charlotte, who stabbed her fork in to nab a white chocolate curl but then went a _tiny_ bit too deep, coming away with a mouthful of cake.

“Whoops.”

Sighing, Mac reaches into the box, swiping a bit of mousse left behind with her finger. And then dabs it onto the tip of Charlotte’s nose. “You missed a bit.”

Charlotte gapes at her.

And then Mac winds up with cake smeared on her cheek, and a giggling eight-year-old pitched headfirst into her lap. “You started it, Momma!”

“Me?” she protests, tickling Charlotte until her legs start to kick, and she shrieks with laughter. “You’re the glutton who couldn’t wait for me to cut you a piece like a civilized little girl!”

What ensues results in much chocolate rubbed off onto cheeks and chins and left on fingers, and Mac eventually concedes before she has to wash the afghan tucked around their shoulders. That is to say, she delicately kisses a dollop of mousse off of Charlotte’s forehead, and then asks her if there’s anything in particular she’d like to watch on Netflix.

(The answer is, as it always has been, Scooby Doo. They end up selecting an older movie about a Witch’s Ghost that Mac knows is too scary for Teddy and Josie, and therefore rarely ever gets watched.)

They still don’t get around to actually putting the cake on _plates_. More of it than intended gets eaten this way, but Mac figures that today is a good day for cake. And that she can always cut it when they’re finished and put it onto one of their own platters and that Teddy and Josie won’t know the difference.

Sometime around the time the dumb horror writer deliberately summons the evil witch in her spectral form Charlotte drops her fork and burrows into her side. The rain outside has tapered off, leaving behind the sound of distant thunder and a haze of condensation on the windows. Mac takes it all as enough of an excuse to tuck the afghan throw around them more tightly.

Just as Mac is considering the tonal dissonance between a talking dog and an unironically megalomaniacal ghost witch, she hears the front door unlock. And then as soon as she hears a familiar gait coming down the hall, relaxes into the couch cushions.

“Hey, I managed to reschedule all of tonight's interviews to this morning and Tess booked me an earlier flight so I could avoid the storms later—” Will appears in the doorway, and then frowns. “Mac, why is there chocolate on your face?”

Blindly, Mac tries to feel for a bit of cake or ganache that she missed, giving Charlotte an amused glance.

“You rescheduled all your interviews for this morning?” she asks Will, finding a bit of crumb coating on her jaw.

He snorts. Kicking off his shoes, he sits down on the couch on the other side of Charlotte, his fingers immediately finding her hair and messing up her pigtails. Scrunching up her nose, Charlotte bats his hands away. Will captures them, and brings them both up for inspection — Mac watches a fleeting expression of anger cross his face when he sees the bruise mottling the back of her right hand, but it’s just that: brief.

He kisses Charlotte’s hand, and puts it back in her lap. “Yeah, Jim and I thought the boss would be fine with the interviews on tonight’s show being pre-taped, so we knocked 'em out early.”

Mac lifts an eyebrow.

(This year’s run-up to Election Day is a week of round table shows and multi-anchor coverage, so she knows that it really doesn’t make a difference. But still.)

“What do we think?” she asks, ducking her head so that her chin fits atop Charlotte’s crown.

She pretends to consider it, looking up at Mac. “Hmm… we think it’s okay. But just this once, or he’s fired.”

Will scoffs, pretending to be deeply offended, and then reaches for their abandoned forks. “Okay, for that I’m stealing your overpriced cake.”

With the squeal, Charlotte launches herself up and wraps her arms around Will’s waist, knocking him off balance just enough that the tongs of his claimed fork prick the bottom of the box instead of the Couronne du Chocolat.

Smiling impishly, she bats her eyes.

“Hi, Daddy.”

Sighing, he drops the fork, and hugs her back. Then allows her to pull him back until he’s in place to be her own personal cushion, and props her legs up across Mac’s lap. Fingers once again finding blonde curls, Will looks at her over the top of Charlotte’s head.

Charlotte notices.

“ _Watch,_ Daddy.”

(After that, MacKenzie’s pretty sure that Charlotte’s going to be just fine.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
